A blog about web development and Drupal.
Since we switched to Slack as the primary means of communication at work, Slack has grown to be my favorite chat application. Not only does it have a very pleasant interface, but it also offers great ways to integrate it with your application. As a matter of fact, their API is among the least restrictive ones in my experience. As a result of the joy of working the Slack API, Slack chat module was born to serve as a proof of concept for embedded Drupal-to-Slack chat functionality. Using Slack chat module, you can add a chat widget to your Drupal site that your visitors can use to chat with…
The Node.js integration Drupal module offers an API that allows developers to add real-time push notification functionality to their modules. Real-time communication could enable features like chat, pop-up notifications, or real-time content update. Chatroom is a great example of how a module can leverage Node.js. What does Node.js integration do? When a visitor opens a page on which the Node.js module is enabled, the client-side JavaScript opens a socket connection between the visitor's browser and the Node.js server. The Node.js server runs the drupal-nodejs application that communicates…
E-commerce sites are more and more commonly offering live chat for their visitors as a way of customer support. There is a wide selection of modules for Drupal that can add this functionality. However, most, if not all, I found rely on third party chat services. A while ago, I decided to build a native live chat module in connection with a project of mine. The module has been released as Customer chat. The primary interface of Customer chat module is a dashboard that site agents can use to accept incoming chats from visitors. This page shows all the active chats that are relevant to the…
It has been a few months since Drupal 8 was released and sites built with it are starting to crop up. I myself have had the pleasure of working with it, and more Drupal 8 projects are certainly on the horizon. From a developer's perspective, this version is substantially different from the previous one, and we will need to learn a handful of new ways of doing things. To ease the process, I have put together this list of how-tos with tasks that I commonly encounter during development. I hope you will find it helpful. Generating URLs In Drupal 7, its path was the definitive way to retrieve a…
In Drupal 7, hook\page\alter was a convenient way to go when we needed to modify page elements that were added by other modules. Drupal 8 does away with this hook - hopefully for the better. To fill the void created by hook\page\alter’s dismissal, the following hooks have been introduced. - hook\page\attachments() - hook\page\attachments\alter() - hook\page\top() - hook\page\bottom() - hook\theme\suggestions\HOOK() - hook\theme\suggestions\HOOK\alter() In addition, we can still implement hook\preprocess\page, which does let us override or add content to the page. However, this hook is…